Stephen Hawking identifies another black hole, called Corbyn

The possessor of one of the most formidable minds of the world today, Stephen Hawking, has joined the growing chorus of Labour supporters calling for the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to resign.

“I regard Corbyn as a disaster,” he told the The Times newspaper, and “I think he should step down for the sake of the party”.

Stephen Hawking sees politics clearly as well as physics

Hawking is one of the leading experts on black holes. No wonder he sees the black hole into which Corbyn’s taking us. Many voters share his vision but not, unfortunately, most Labour Party members: an Election Data poll of members found that he would be re-elected leader if he had to stand again today.

They’re clearly not reading the evidence of approaching disaster the same way as the rest of us, including Hawking.

As is well known, Hawking is a long-term sufferer from Motor Neurone Disease. This led to a fine transatlantic interchange in 2009, when Republicans opposed to Obama’s healthcare reforms made the bizarre claim that the NHS would have regarded Hawking’s life as “worthless” because of his disabilities and refused to treat him. As Hawking replied, “"I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS.”

That’s particularly relevant today, faced as we are by a new Conservative budget. It continues the seven years of austerity that we have already had and which have had no impact on the scale of the country’s debt, which keeps climbing to peacetime records. Another group of people has now been attacked, this time the self-employed who are being forced to pay higher national insurance contributions.

This explicitly breaches a pledge made by the Conservatives in the run up to the last election under two years ago.

The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, has found some additional funds to back the ‘free school’ initiative, in reality a most expensive form of schooling, for which the results have been at best mixed. Education desperately needs funding but not in this unnecessary way.

Meanwhile, even the police and prison service, generally the parts of the public sector least abhorrent to the Conservatives, are creaking at the seams, unable to act effectively against smaller crime or control the prison population.

What’s most terrifying, though, and must be particularly hurtful to Hawking is that there is no attempt to address the desperate financial crisis facing the NHS. Two thirds of English hospitals are running at a deficit. Accident and Emergency services are struggling, and frequently failing, to cope. Waiting times for operations are on the climb again, having been brought down to acceptable levels – eighteen weeks maximum – by the last Labour government.

Why is this being allowed to happen? The Conservative majority is wafer thin. With a half-way effective opposition, it would have to think carefully about continuing to undermine the NHS. It would have to wonder whether it could get away with breaking its election pledges.

None of that applies if the opposition has an ineffective leader, leaving it incapable of mounting an effective resistance to its rule. Labour is reduced to meaninglessness under Corbyn, seen by too few as an alternative Prime Minister. The Conservatives could even, as has been rumoured, hold an election shortly and trounce him. Why would they do that? They may be bold enough to feel they can count on Corbyn refusing to step down, on the grounds that he’s had too short a tenure, encouraging Conservative hopes that they could thrash him again five years later.

In February, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, held a 17 point positive rating: 53% of respondents to a survey by Ipsos MORI were satisfied with her against 36% who were not. The same poll found Corbyn had a 38 point negative rating: 24% satisfied and 62% dissatisfied.

If you’re tempted to object that polls get figures wrong, it’s worth bearing in mind that in the UK they tend to overstate not understate Labour support.

The Election Data poll of Labour members meanwhile tells us that 51% of Labour members think Corbyn is doing well, against 47% who think he’s doing badly.

It feels to me as though the gulf between voters and Labour Party members is as wide as I’ve ever seen it. No wonder people like Stephen Hawking feel things are heading in a catastrophic direction.

Sometimes I have a nightmarish vision in which backing for Corbyn continues to fall until there are only 300,000 supporters left. Sadly, they are precisely the 300,000 Corbyn supporters who dominate the Party and keep him in office. Giving the Conservatives all the encouragement they need to break their pledges and decimate public services vital to us.

The police. The prison service. Education.

Above all the jewel in the crown, the service that matters so much to Hawking, the National Health Service.

A dire anniversary, which calls for action

Thirty years ago today, on 3 December 1984, the people of Bhopal in Central India woke up to the realisation that their city had been the victim of perhaps the worst industrial accident the world has seen.

Overnight, the toxic gas Methyl Isocyanate leaked from the local fertiliser plant run by Union Carbide. Estimates of deaths vary, though it seems likely that 8000 died within a fortnight and 8000 later on as a result of the poisoning. The Indian government counted nearly 600,000 injuries, some 42,000 of them serious including nearly 4000 permanently disabling.

Bhopal victims lie where they fell, on 3 December 1984

To this day, there are children in Bhopal struggling with serious disability that most experts attribute to the accident, though the allegations is impossible to prove.

Eventually, Union Carbide paid $470 million in compensation, which works out at around $900 million in today’s terms. Taking only the deaths into account, that works out at about $56,000 per life, about $3000 more than US median salary currently. It seems that the worth of an Indian life takes a relatively low-paid US worker just over a year to earn, and that’s if we think the injuries to survivors count for nothing.

Union Carbide now belongs to Dow Chemical. For the year up to the third quarter of 2014 its earnings (profit) were about $2.3 billion, approximately twice the compensation paid for Bhopal. It paid its Chief Executive, Andrew N. Liveris, a little over $20 million last year, or a tad under the equivalent of 360 Bhopal lives.

In 2013, Dow Chemical paid over a million dollars in political contributions, getting on for 20 Bhopal lives’ worth. They contributed to both main parties in the US though, if we exclude the sums going to ostensibly non-party Political Action Committees and the like, Republicans received nearly four times as much as Democrats.

Like most large corporations, Dow is buying itself politicians, and is principally favouring its natural allies in the Republican Party.

By coincidence, today, as well as being the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, also saw newspaper stories about the physicist Stephen Hawking. He was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease at 21 and given two years to live; this year, he celebrated his 72nd birthday.

He owes his survival to his doctors. But he owes his ability to communicate, given that he now can only do so through moving a cheek muscle, to Intel with whom he has collaborated for many years. The work the company has done with him will benefit many highly disabled people.

Comparing the Intel and Dow stories teaches a key lesson: corporations are neither good nor bad, any more than guns are. What matters, in both areas, is what use we make of them. Helping Steven Hawking and others afflicted by a terrible debilitating disease? Good. Poisoning Bhopal? Bad.

It’s the same with guns. Sometimes we just have to use them, whether it’s to defeat the Nazis or ISIS. At other times, we’d like them securely locked away somewhere. Over here in Europe, we have taken strict steps to make sure they are, steps the US would do well to imitate.

Sadly, however, though we haven’t allowed the US to influence us out of gun regulation – we have, you might say, stuck to our guns – we seem to be having trouble breaking with US thinking on regulating our corporations.

Putting that right, so that we move towards a society in which a bunch of reckless bankers can’t put our entire finance system at risk, or a bunch of inept managers poison an entire city in India, feels to me to be as urgent for the world as gun control is in the US. And a lot more important than cutting immigration.

Besides, what better tribute could there be to the suffering citizens of Bhopal?